climate denial
MSNBC has added Bret Stephens, climate denier formerly of the WSJ, lately of the NYT, to their list of commenters. Shame on them.
Also, shame on Wikipedia and others for referring to Stephens as a journalist. He is no more a journalist than Anne Coulter. He is a commenter. (He's way better than Coulter, of course.)
Prior related posts:
Out of the gate, Bret Stephens punches the hippies, says dumb things
Honestly, New York Times? You are entitled to publish all the opinions, but not to endorse your own facts!
My letter to the New York Times
Dear New York Times: Climate Change Is Real
The…
I've been meaning to write a letter to the New York Times I just wrote this letter to the New York Times about their very wrong decision to add a climate science denier to their editorial staff. When they were recently challenged about this idea, the response was, paraphrasing, "millions of people believe this man that climate change is not for real."
Coming from the New York Times I find that deeply disturbing and overwhelmingly offensive.
Anyway, I haven't written my letter yet, but my friend and colleague Stefan Rahmstorf, climate scientist, did, and he says it is OK to post it. So, here…
Nearly two years ago, Science magazine published the following Lead Letter, signed by 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences addressing attacks on the integrity of climate science. The science has continued to strengthen, the evidence in real world observations has become even stronger and more obvious.
In response, in the past few months, there has been a last-gasp effort (see, for example, here and here) on the part of the ever-shrinking group of hard-core climate deniers to confuse the public and especially our elected officials. Given this continuing profusion of false and…
Deep Climate has a great run down of Richard Muller's recent public appearances and some details on his ties to the Koch brothers, it is well worth a careful read. And while we're talking about Richard Muller, check out NPR's shameful decision to "balance" Muller's converted-to-mainstream scientific views with the provision of a soap box to Anthony Watts, master of BS (aka Blog Science). Video interview is below, I have not decided if I want to expose myself to that or not....
This was also discussed on P3.
Much has been written of late about the nature of denialism. New Scientist a couple of issues back produced a special report on the subject, for example, and the New Humanist explores the idea of "unreasonable doubt."
There's plenty more out there. The most provocative I've come across (thanks to Joss Garman via DeSmog Blog's Brendan DeMelle) is a 2009 paper in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics by Jeroen van Dongen of the Institute for History and Foundations of Science at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His thesis is ideologically based denialism of…